President Obama goes old-time Democrat in State of the Union

Barack Obama offered a new political product on Tuesday night, a brand with a distinctively retro flavor — “Democrat Classic.”

Four years after his first State of the Union, Obama rolled out a series of vintage proposals from his party’s amply stocked policy cupboard — a $1.75-an-hour hike in the federal minimum wage, an ambitious plan to expand public preschool education to all kids, reintroduction of a $50 billion infrastructure plan, and resurrection of climate change legislation.

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Obama's 2013 SOTU speech

Taken as a whole, it marked the latest step in a clear effort by Obama to nudge the nation’s politics to the center-left, a shift from the center-right politics of Ronald Reagan that have dominated American political life for more than three decades.

The scale of his new spending proposals was relatively modest, but the new programs targeted improving life on the lowest rungs of America’s working class, delighting liberals and eliciting charges of overreach by Republicans, who are unlikely to pass much of what Obama laid on the table Tuesday night.

“It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country — the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love,” he said as he began a speech that lived up to its billing as a bookend to his progressive inaugural address three weeks ago.

“It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation of ours,” he added.

Obama called for bipartisanship, but drew limits at how far he was willing to go to cut deals, a marked contrast from his first term, when he sought with little success to reach a grand bargain on the budget and deficits with GOP leaders.

Over and again in the hourlong speech, Obama cast himself as champion of the working classes and portrayed Republicans as protectors of the wealthy and powerful — in a speech that began with a John F. Kennedy quote and could have been comfortably delivered by JFK, FDR or LBJ.

Obama’s more immediate aim was to back Republicans into a corner on the upcoming fight over $1.2 trillion in budget cuts triggered on March 1 by the sequester by harnessing public opinion for his own approach — through fewer budget cuts than Republicans want, a more modest approach to reforming runway entitlement programs and a greater emphasis on raising new tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy.